TE

N

ElE

VE

N

TW

EL

VE

TH

IRT

EE

N

FOU

RT

EE

N

FIFTE

EN

Inside The R

ight Stuff

"We're A

ll Going to Fuckin' D

ie!"

A V

iew of H

eaven

The S

acred Cham

ber

A C

ertain Nobility

The D

ay of the Fall

Appendix: T

he Rules of A

dventure

Selected B

ibliography

Acknow

ledgments

Index

Authors Note

172

193

217

227

247

260

278

297

303

305

319

PRO

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MO

ST

CH

ILDR

EN

AR

E T

OLD

fantastic stories, which they grad-

ually come to realize are not true. A

s I grew up, the fantastic sto~

Ties I'd heard as a young child turned out to be true. T

he more I

learned, the more fantastic and true the stories seem

ed.T

hey were unlike the stories other children heard. T

hey were

gruesome, im

probable, and sad. I didn't repeat them because T

thought no one would believe m

e. They w

ere the stories of ayoung m

an falling out of the sky. Unlike Icarus, w

ho had flown

too high, he had not flown high enough, A

t 27,000 feet, his wing

was blow

n off by a Germ

an Flakbatalion, which w

as firing 88-m

illimeter antiaircraft shells over the rail yards outside of D

ussel-dorf. A

nd unlike Icarus, he's still alive as I write this.

Federico Gonzales, m

y father, was a First L

ieutenant near the endof W

orld War IT

, He w

as piloting a B-17 for the E

ighth Air Force,

when that organization had evolved into a m

arvelous machine for

turning young men into old m

emories. H

e was on his tw

enty-fifthand last m

ission, which he w

as eager to complete, because he and his

buddy, David Sw

ift, were going to sign up to fly P-51 M

ustang

10PR

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PRO

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E11

fighter planes, the knights of the sky, My father w

as like that,despite having been shot dow

n before. He'd enlisted in the last

cavalry outfit before the war. H

e rode horses at a gallop while em

p-

tyng the clip of his ,45 Model 1911-A

, reloading while turning to

come back and hit the targets again. vV

hen the wör started, the cav-

alry was m

echanized, and he began searching for the next bestthing. H

e discovered airplanes. He w

ent out for fighters, but theyneeded bom

ber pilots, and as his comm

anding officer told me forly-

five years later, "Your dad had a flair for flying on instrurnents."

When his B

-17 was hit on January 23, 1945, he w

as the leadpilot for O

Ile of those enormous air raids that the U

nited States

was conducting at the tim

e. The C

omm

andant of the 398th Bom

bG

roup, Colonel F

rank Hunter, had asked m

y father's regular co-pilot to stand dow

n so that he could fly Tight seat in the leaù plane

and see the action. The bom

bers had taken off in great "'laves of

smoke before daw

n, fanned up, and churned out over the English

Channel from l"uthampstead Base,

They'd reached the target area and w

ere on the bomb T

un when

grollid fire from the Flakbatalion cut the left w

ing of my father's

B-17 in half just inboard of the num

ber one engine. It was rotten

luck. During the bom

b run, you couldn't take evasive action or thebom

bs would go astray. M

oreover, his was the first plane in the for-

mation, and the hit w

as the very first firing. It was a m

ortal wound

to the plane and 90 peTcent fatal to the crew

. The blast w

as deafen-

ing, and my father saw

imm

ediately that there was going to he no

flying out of this. He turned to his boss beside hirn and said,

"VV

ell, I guess this is it.)1

Then the plane rolled over, ignoring m

y father's attempts to

right it, and began some sort of inverted flat spin. H

e couldn't tellprecisely w

hat sort, for the world had turned into a nasty soup of

unfamiliar colors. H

e gave the bail-out orders through the inter-com

to the crew, unsure if the thing w

as even working or had been

shot to pieces by the flak. All the lights, horns, and klaxons w

eregoing at once as the plane protested with a great crescendo of

whines, groans, and the how

ling noise coming through exploded

wind screens. IV

I)' father looked over at Colonel H

unter and real-

ized t.hat he was already dead, hit by flak or sorne bit of flying

metal from

the fractured plane.U

pside-down, spinning, he groped for the parachute beneath

his se¡:t. They'd started at 27,000 feet and he had no idea how

high

they were, but knew

he had to get out. The fliers w

ere supposed tow

ear their parachutes at all times, but the salty old dogs, as Jny

father was then at age tw

enty-three, kept them under their seats,

because the damned things w

ere so uncoiiifortahic t.o sit on for tenhours. A

nd anyway, the choices they gave you w

ere, as the fliersliked to say, exceedingly butt-puckering, inasm

uch as a pilotdescending beneath a 40-foot canopy niade a great target forsharpshooters. E

ven the farmers caie out to try their hand at bag-

ging an Am

erjcan flier. The w

muen and children w

ould be gather-ing, too, to collect the bounty from

a shattered B-17: nylon, w

ool,

plastic, Dietal of all sorts, anù silk from

parachutes and from the

escape and evasion maps.

He couldn't reach his parachute w

ith the stupid harness on, sohe released it. T

he centrifugal force slannned him into the instru-

ment panel w

ith such force that it nearly knocked him out. It cut

off his oxygen supply, "\vhich was fed through a thick rubber tube

running up his chest to his face mask. Smashed against the

instrument panel, losing altitude he knew

not how fast, he

reached up with a hand that seem

ed made of lead now

and pulledthe face m

ask off to get a breat.h of air. He saw

Hunter flopped

over, hanging helplessly in his harness. He took a breath. D

amn.

PT

obably stil above 20,000 feet, he thought, and passed out tram

hypoxia.V

Vhile he w

as out, his aircraft broke in two am

idships. On the

ground, an old wom

an, Mrs. Peiffer, saw

somet.hing am

azing: boysfalling out of the sky. O

f the ten-man crew

, only my father sur-

vived, and he was severely injured, as m

ight be anticipated in afive-mile falL.

12PR

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When he aw

oke, the motion had stopped. lie w

as crumpled and

jamed beneath the instrum

ent panel down by tbe big naked alu-

minum

. rudder pedals. He saw

sky outside the shattered canopy, a

placental overcast from w

hich he'd been born. A m

an appeared inthe broken w

indow fram

e, standing on the 5tU b of the T

ight wing.

He pointed a pistol at m

y father's head. He w

as a local man, a G

er-m

an peasant. The idea of killing an A

merican pilot w

as not anunpopular one in those parts. lvly father w

atched with detached

curiosity as the man pulled the trigger_

IN 1958, w

hen I was ten years old, I w

orked in a medical school

laboratory at the Houston ivledical C

enter. J\1y father was a bio-

physicist there. I convinced him to take m

e to work w

ith him so

that I could find out what he did, w

hich he didn't seem able to

explain. I'd been after him about it since I w

as v~ry little, and by

the time I w

as five, I had started to think that he niight have beenin the slow

group at scientist schooL. A

ll the other fathers couldexplain .w

hat they did. VV

hen I was eight, he started taking m

e to

the lab with him

after school and on weekends and letting ine

wash glassw

are and do other menial jobs. B

ut gradually, he gavem

e more responsibility. I learned to m

ake microscope slides before

J learned how to dance.

One of m

y earliest jobs in the lab was to take the trash to the

incinerator. The trash often consisted of cut-up m

ice and suchthings as com

e out of a biological sciences lab. So I'd lug the trashbags dow

n the vast tiled corridor, which V

iras dimly lit from

eitherside by the glass vi

trines in which the dem

onstration specimens

floated in their baths of formalin. T

here was a hum

an head slicedinto half-inch thick slabs, neat as you please. T

here were m

anyfetuses at various stages of developm

ent. And there w

as one lady,headless, arrnless, her torso cut in half from

the top of her ster-num

to her crotch. She floated in formalin like a nightm

are ofB

otticelli's Venus about to be born on an ocean w

ave.

PRO

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E13

I proceeded to the furnacc and cranked the steel handle untilthe heavy rusted door opened to reveal a roaring orange infernow

ithin. I was just about to toss in the trash bags w

hen I saw a

human arm

sticking up out of the flames. A

t first 1 was shocked,

thcn frightened. Then I realized that., of course, that's w

hereV

enus' arms m

ust have gone long ago, along ,""ith a lot of otherspare parts, A

nd I thought: What the heck am

I doing here! Icouldn't answ

er the question then, but I can now; I w

as chasingniy father, trying to get som

e of that righteous stuff he had. 1lVhat

else docs a son do but try to learn from his father?

Since he was a scientist, I grew

up believing in science. That

meant I had, before 1 cven knew

it, already embarked on a search

for some universal law

s-the Rules of L

ife.

MY

INT

ER

EST

in survival began early, when I w

as a child andlearned w

hat my father had done in the w

ar. That hc had lived

while so rrian)~

others had died seemed to m

e to have so much

meaning. I heard the stories over and O

ver and could never seem to

plumb their m

ystery. His survival m

ade me believe that he had

some special, inetfoble quality_ T

felt urgently that I ought to ha\'eit, too.

Gradually, I developed the idea that to survive, you rnust first be

annealed in the fires of periL. E

ven his everyday life seemed a

periL. All around him

were the dead, yet he lived on, laughing.

Eventually, I ,"vent looking for m

y own brand of periL

. I deliber-ately took risks so that I m

ight sunive them. vV

e lived on a bayou

in southeast Texas, and from

about the time J w

as seven, it ..vas my

private wilderness, w

ith alligators and snapping turtles, rat-tlesnakes and w

ater moccasins, and strange displaced characters.

My Irish C

atholic Germ

an mother had so niany babies-w

hocould keep track of them

all I pretty much ran w

ild,,"V

hen r ,"vas in t.he fourth grade, 1 began writing about the risks

I toolc By the tim

e I was in iny tw

enties, J was doing it as a jour-

,.PR

OL

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PRO

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E15

nalist. After thirt years, I realized I'd been w

riting about survivalall along w

ithout knowing it. B

ut I'd always com

e home from

astory w

ondering: Do I have it now

? Aiii I a ~urvivor? O

r is therem

ore?

I became a pilot. T

began writing about big aviation accidents,

that boundary between life and death w

here my father had m

adehis bones.

With m

y interest in science, then, I thought there must be som

eresearch that could help m

e to understand the mysteries of sur-

vival I'd encountered. I found otherwise rational people doing

inexplicable things to get themselves killed-against all advice,

against all reason. A perfectly sensible m

an on a snowm

obile isw

arned not to go up a hill because it will probably produce a

fatally large avalanche, lie goes up anyway and dies, A

firefighterand experienced outdoors

man know

s he is going in the wrong

direction but persists anyway and w

inds up profoundly lost in thew

ilderness. A num

ber of scuba divers are found dead with air in

their tanks. They pulled the regulators from

their mouths and

died. If you had magically transported them

to the surface am

oment before they rem

oved their regulators and asked themabout their im

pulse, they would have told you that it m

ade nosense: T

he regulator was necessary for their survivaL

. If you were

able to ask them afterw

ard, they would tell you that they didn't

intend to take it out. They intended to live.

After reading hundreds of accident reports and w

riting scores ofarticles, I began to w

onder if there wasn't som

e mysterious force

hidden within us that produces such mad behavior. Most people

find it hard to believe that reason doesn't control our actions. VV

e

believe in free will and rational behavior. T

he difficulty wit.h those

assumptions com

es when w

e see rational people doing irrationalthings,

Those w

ho survive are just as baffling. I knew, for exam

ple, thatan experienced hunter m

ight perish while lost in the w

oods for asingle night, w

hereas a four-year-old might survive. V

Vben five

people are set adrift at sea and only two com

e back, what m

akes

the difference? VV

o survived Nazi prison cam

ps? Why did Scott's

crew perish in A

ntarctica while, against all odds, Shacklet.on1s crew

survived and evcn thrived in the same circumstances? V\fiy was a

seventeen-year-old girl able to walk out of the Peruvian jungle,

while the adults w

ho were lost w

ith her sat down and died? It w

asT

naddening to find survival so unpredictable, because after all, sci-

ence seeks predictability. But as I raked the ashes of catastrophe, I

began to see the outlines of an explanation.1\-1ost of w

hat I discovered through the years of research and

reporting was not new

. I acquainted myself w

Ith recent researchon the w

ay the brain functions, but also with fundam

ental princi-pIes that have been around for centuries-in some cases, thou-

sands of years-as well as w

ith the psychology of risk taking andsurvivaL. T

he principles apply to wilderness survival, but they also

apply to any stressful, demanding situation, such as getting

through a divorce, losing a job, surviving illness1 recovering froman injury, or running a business in a rapidly changing w

orld.It's easy to im

agine t.hat wilderness survival w

ould involveequipm

ent, training, and experience. It turns out that, at them

oment of truth, those m

ight he good things to have but theyaren't decisive. T

hose of us who go into the w

ilderness or seek our

thrills in contact with the forces of nature soon learn, in fact., that

experience, training, and modern equipm

ent can betray you. The

maddening thing for som

eone with a 'V

estern scientific turn ofm

ind is that it's not what's in your pack that separates the quick

from the dead. It's not even what's in YOUT iuind. Corny as it

sounds, it's ,vhat.'s in your heart.

ON

E

JJLO

OK

OU

T,

HERE COMES

RA

Y C

HA

RL

ES"

I f YO U CO U LOsee adrenaline, then you'd see a great green

greasy river of it oozing off the beach at San D

iego tonight. You'd

see it flowing one hundred nlIles out tow

ard the stern of theboat-that's w

hat the pllots call it, a boat, despite the fact that itdisplaces 95,000 tons of w

ater, has a minim

um of six thousand

people living on board at all times, and is as long- as the E

mpire

State B

uilding is talL.

I'm standing with half a dozen sweaty guys on the LSO plat-

form, w

hich at 8 by 8 feet seems very crow

ded just now. .V

Ve'rc

steaming into the prevailing ,vind at "around 30 knots" (the exac.t

speed being classified), and I'm trying not to be jostled tow

ard the70-foot gulp dow

n to the water, T

he steel blade of this boat hasripped up the belly of the sea, and I w

ateh for a mom

ent as itscurling intestines glisten w

ith moonlight and roll aw

ay behind us.O

n my left is M

ike Yankovich, the landing signal officer (L

SO),

in his goggles and cranial, his gaze fixed intently about 15 degreesabove the horizon. H

e's got a heavy-looking telephone handsetpressed to his left ear, pickle sw

itch held high In his right hand,

22HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

nLOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

23

It's called the pickle switch because it looks llke fl large B

akelitekosher pickle w

ith a silver ring enclosing a black trigger.Y

ankovich has his index fing-er and thurnb poised to press the cut

light or wave-off light sw

itches in case he needs to tell the pilot toadd pow

er or not to land. The m

en inadvertently nudge me tow

ard

the eùge in their enthusiaSlIi to get a look at the F

-18 Hornet that.'s

bearing down on us at 150 m

iles an hour.

A m

ile out, it doesn't look like much yet, just a black dart, a

darker darkness in a sky full of hun-bomb stars. I know

those mon-

ster GE

engines are burning kerosene faster than a V-2 rocket, but

I can't near them yet. T

here's just that silent insect shape, unfold-ing like an origam

i airplane, a black bat in the bat black night.I look at the faces arouw

line. Each m

an has a lump in his cheek

from the T

ootsie Roll Pops a ivlarinc passed Q

ut a few ininutes ago.

Their w

hite eyes stare intently at the blossoming shape thats

chewing up the stars. R

ut they're not staring the way I'm

staring.T

hey're different. They're like kids w

aiting their turn on theroner coaster. A

nd as the plane, :16 feet long, 40 feet wide, heads

straight for us, I'm thinking: T

f're all gainl; to die.T

he place where that huge m

ach-irie is ineant to land stretches

away only a few feet from us. 1 can see the dashed white foul line

shining against the black nonskid deck ("foul" rneaning: you

step over it, you die). V'le are standing beside the arrival end of a

very short runway built onto the ùeck of the boat. It stretches

away tm~rard the bow at an angle to the keeL. The arresting

cables, gray and greasy, slither away tow

ard the starboard side.T

he theory is that the pilot will com

e in just right and the hookdangling froin his tail w

ill catch one of the four wires, w

hichw

ill stop him.

The rest of the deck is a chaos of action as planes refuel and

taxi and launch, the A-6s and F-18s and the sexy old T

omcats (last

of the stick-and-rudfler airplanes)i lumbering like slow

beasts tothe m

otions of the yellowshirts and the grapes (purple shirts) in

their goggles and cranials, who rotate their gauntlet-gloved hands

in cryptic signals as the airplanes taxi and queue up for the cat. Tn

the wild deck lights, w

ith the cacophonous inetallic niusic, it hasthe dir of an atavistic ritual \vith m

ighty flaming totem

s.If 1 tU

rn around, T can just see the shooter peering out of his

bathyscaph bubbh~ in the deck plates in an eerie sulphur light.T

here goes another one now-ka-chunk-w

hoosh.l-in a sleet stormof inetal particles and this am

azing hissing scream like som

eone'stearing a hole in he-11. T

hen two angry afterburner eyes seem

to

hang motionless in the darkness, as the bat shape shinnies up a

pigtail of smoke and is gone.

I hear Yankovich through the headphones Inside m

y cranialand turn back to the F

~ 18 bearing do\vn on us. H

e's speaking over

the telephone handset.T

he pilot's quaking voice responds, "Three-one-four H

ornet b-b-ball, three-poi

nt-two."

"Roger ball, wind twenty knots axiaL."

He's at a quarter inile, a child in a glass bubble, alone in the

night, \\'Îth the dying yellow stars of deck lights below

, the coldw

ind whittling curls of cloud off the cheesy m

oon, the whistling

thunder at his back, as he hurtles toward the. heaving seai strad-

dling two gigantic flam

ethroviers.

At last w

e feel the concussion through OU

T feet. T

he two-,iiiirci

that great fat cable, is turned into a singing liquid instrument by

the shock, Ravi Shankar m

eets the Term

inator. It catches theplane like a fish, play ing it out 200 feet. T

he plane shudders allover, as the pilot (D

el Rio by nam

e-I had seen it painted on hiscockpit rail) hangs in his harness in total (;-shock for a m

01Lientbefore he can reach up w

ith a hand that seems to w

eigh l()pounds and pull the throttle back to idle, N

ow thc yellow

shirtsw

ave him to\-vard the huffer cart w

here the grapes will refuel

him.So that he can go up and do jt again.

24HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

"LOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

25

DE

L RIO

'S perform

ance was a perfect act of survivaL. T

here he

was, safe on the deck of a big boat. H

e climbed into a m

ach-iiic fullof explosive fuel and had him

self shot off into the night "\"'1th anuclear steani cat. T

hen, using only his skill and his superior emo-

tional control, he brought himself back by the rerriaT

kablc per-form

ance of catching a win~ that he could not see w

ith a hook thathe could not see, using cues that m

ade no natural sense, while

going 150 miles an hour in the black-ass night.

::'Iost of 11S w

ill never get into quite the same jam

as Del R

io,

but every survival situation is the same in its essence, and so there

are lessons to be learned tonight. The first lesson is to rerriain

calm, not to panic. B

ecause emotions are called "hot cognitions,"

this is known as "being cooL

" "Cool" as a slang expression g-oes

back to the 1800s, hut its contemporary sense originated w

ithA

frican Am

erican jazz Iliusicians in the 1940s. Jazz was "cool"

compared \-vith the hot, em

otional bebop it had begun to over-shadow

. Some researchers suggest that A

frican Am

erican jazzm

usicians refused to let themselves get hot (get angry) in the face

of racisTI1. Inst~

ad, they remained outw

ardly cairn and channeled

emotion into m

usic as a survival strategy in a hostile environm~nt.

They turned fear and anger into focus, and '(focus" is just a

metaphorical w

ay of saying that they were able to concentrate

their a t.en lion on the matter at hand.

rd been searching all my life for that state of cool rd seen m

yfather exhibit, because (t had brought him

home in one piece.

(Well, a lot of pieces, actually, but they'd knitted back together,

rriore or less, by the time I w

as born.)

Only 10 to 20 percent of people can stay calm

and think in them

idst of a survival eIliergenc:y: They are t.he ones w

ho can perceive

their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action, all ofw

hich are key elements of survivaL. C

onfronted with a changing

environrnent1 they rapidly adapt. Those are the kind of pilots w

ho

are supposed to be flying off the deck of t.he Carl Pinson tonight.

Getting back onto the deck is t.he final exam

.

I'D 5 E

EN

Del R

io earlier when he cam

e in a bit late for the 1800briefing in R

eady .:irie, a steel room w

here we w

ere all slouchedin com

fortable maroon N

augahyde chairs, trying to look like we

weren't scared out of our w

its. Every few

rIlinutes the catapultshook the w

hole boat-ka-chunk-wlw

ush.'--as if we w

ere takingE

xocet missile fire. N

obody even flinched. Yankovich had just

begun the briefing for these, his students, when D

el Rio w

alked in,having obviously gotten up froiii a nap. T

he side of his face stillbore the im

print of the pillow.

¡(Hey, got a little rack burn there," Y

ankovich remarked. ¡(P

rac-

ticing for the luge run?" They call it the luge run because w

henyou're trying to sleep in those tiny racks and the boat is churningalong through the w

aves and planes are exploding off the deckover your head, it feels like the \V

inter Olym

pics meets V

Vorld

War IlL.Y

ankovich, a square-jawed, athletic-looking youth w

ith brown

hair, green eyes, and a big grin, knew he could tease D

el Rio,

because in such a place of hyPervigilance as this, where nothing,

no rnatter how su btle, w

ent unnoticed, everyone knew, w

ithouteven having to stop and consider it, that to be ablc to drop off tosleep tw

o hours before your first night carrier landing; was to dis-

playa righteous and masterful state of coolness.

I'd gone to stay on the Carl V

inson as part of my lifelong fasci-

nation with that boundclry region betw

een life and death, thatplace w

here, to stay alive, you have to remain calm

and alert. The

reason it's a boundary region is that not everyone can do it. Some

faiL. Sonie die.

Shortly before J arrived, one of the pilots was on final, heaùing-

toward the deck. H

e let his descent rate get away from

him and got.

low and slow

, and well. . . SollIe w

ould use the term "panic," but

26HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

that doesn't tell us much. T

here were plenty of sensory signals

screaming at him

that he'd better get on the pO\ver. (llis hand w

as

already on the throttle. All he had to do ,..'as m

ove it a few inchei:.)

The L

SO had hit the pickle sw

itch, activating those glaring redlights that m

ean You are nol cleared to land/T

he ball, an obvious

light in a big Fresnel lens, w

as right in front of him, telling hini

he was low

. And, of course, the L

SO w

as also yelling in his ear,Som

ehmv none of it got through.

The iinpacl w

ith the tail of th(~ boat cut the plane in two, leav-

ing his WSO

(the guy in the rear scat) squashed like a bug on aw

indshield and sending the pilot skittering across the deck in ashow

er of sparks, still strapped into his l\Iartiri-Raker ejection seat.

The pilot lived, and cilthough I'm

not sure he got to try that trickagain, I'm

reasonably certain that he got to have lunch with the

captain.B

ut the most m

ystifying thing was hov.. he could have kept O

J!C

OD

ling tmvard the boat in the face of so m

uch information telling

him not to. T

hat ,vas the real boundary 1 was after: V

\-rat ,vas hethinking? H

e was sm

art, well prepared, and highly trained. Som

e-thing pow

erful had blocked it all, and something had forced him

to reach for the deck despite all the information he had that it w

asa bad idea. It rem

inded me of a lot of accident.s in the vtilderness

and in risky outdoor sports (river running, for example), w

herepeople ignore the obvious anù do the inexplicable. T

hat was the

mystery I'd been tryng to unraveL.

WH

AT

TH

E P

ILOT

S on the C

arl Vinson know

is this: Shit docs

just happen soiiicti mes, as the bum

per sticker says. There are

things you can't control, so you'd better know how

you're going toreact to thein. Y

ankovich explained it to me: "T

he launch barbreaks. T

he shuttle goes supersonic and hits the water brake. T

hew

ater brake turns instantly to steam from

all that energy andexplodes, D

eck plates come flying up, and you fly right through

"LOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

27

the deck plates as YO

ll take off. So you eject and land on the deck."

That's w

hat's known in fighter pilot parlance as "N

ot your day."B

ut there are also the things you can control, and you'd better be

controlling the-Tn all the tim

e.

So this is how Y

ankovich began the 1800 briefing in Ready

i\-ine on the Carl V

inson that night: "It will scare the living shit

out of you. If you taxi to the cat and you don't have a knot in yourstoH

iach1 there's something w

rong. It's like walking into a closet.

You're going to go right off into a black hole. Y

ou're sittiug theresucking oxygen, you'd better have a plan. B

ecause if you don't,you're screw

ed, and then you're fucked."VVe'd all seen the two helicopters orbiting out there (in ease

sorueone went into the w

ater) and the big yellow crane to pick up

planes that got stuck halfway over the side. A

nd ihose were for the

lucky guys. The first rule is: Face reality. G

ood survivors aren'tim

niune to fear. They know

what's happening, and it does ¡'scare

the living shit out of" them. It's all a question of w

hat you do next.T

he briefing was iiot about im

parting technical knowledge. if

those guys didn't know that stuff already, they vlluldn't be sitting

here with their naines stenciled on the backs of their chairs (nick-

names, actually: H

airball, Eel, C

racker, Sewdaw

g, Stubby), Part ofthe briefing w

as to remind them

of stuff they knew aireaclyi the

way a hynin does in church, but nothing too coItiplex, because in

,,,hat psychologists would call their "high state of arousal," noth-

ing too complex was going to get through anyway_

No, the briefing w

as more about how

Yankovich said things,

and how he said them

was w

ith a dark, dark humor. It w

as a littleritual, in w

hich everyone was rem

inded how to look death in the

face and st.ill CO

lne up with a w

ry smile. In a true .survival situa-

tion, you are by definition looking death in the face, and if youca111t find som

ething droll and even soniething wondrous and

inspi ring in it, you are already in a virorld of hurt.

Al Siebert, a psychologist and author of T

he Survivor Personal-ity, w

rites that survivors "laugh at threats. . _ playing and laugh-

28HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

irig go together. Playing keeps the person in contact with w

hat ishappening around (him

J." To deal w

ith reality you must first rec-

ognize it as such.In keeping w

ith that view, the pilots on the C

arl Vinson rarely

talked earnestly about the risk this close to flight time, T

hey jokedabout it instead. B

ecause if you let yourself get too serious, youw

ill get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you'reon a runaw

ay horse. Fear is good. Too m

uch fear is not.Y

ankovich continued his briefing: "The steam

curtain comes up

and you lose the yello\vshirt for a minute. Y

ou'll be a hero realquick if you have the fold handle in the w

rong position, so checkthat. S

pread 'em, five potatoes, and you're all set. O

kay, wipeout,

the engines come up, see that they m

atch. The safety guys jum

pup and m

ake sure the beer cans are down. T

ension signaL. Hands

you off to the shooter, and then: head back and four G'8. G

rab thetow

el rack. Touch the ejection seat handle and m

ake sure you'renot sitting on it. 1£ you lose an engine on the cat, stroke the blow

-ers, tw

elve-to-fourteen~not-to-exceed-sixteen. Rad A

lt: You see

you're descending, the wiser m

an will grab the handle."

What the hell did he just say, , , !

The first tim

e I heard a briefing like that, I was lost. B

ut that'spart of the point: only those w

ho get it get it. A nod is as good as a

wink to a blind horse. Just for the record, w

hat Yankovich said w

asthat it w

ould be a very bad idea to try to depart with your w

ingsfolded up, as they are for taxiing around on the deck. It takes fiveseconds for theni to lock dow

n into place after you move the handle,

so you count off as follmvs: one-potato, tw

o-potato, three-potato. . .

Then, after all the technical bits of the launch process have been

checked (the wipeout w

ith the stick to inake sure your controls arem

oving freely, checking to see that the engines are both producing

the same am

ount of power, and so on), you're going to hold onto a

metal bar know

n as the towel rack (because tha1's w

hat it lookslike) to keep yourself from

being slamm

ed back by the foree of thecatapult. A

nd just in case that isn't complicated enough, rem

ember

"LOOK OUT, HERE (OMES RAY CHARLES"

29

thi:l. one of your engines could quit, iii which case you have to put

the other engine into afterburner (known as the blower because it

blows) to get enough pow

er to keep going up (but don't overspeedit, those engines are expensive). A

nd since nothing ever works out

as planned, check t.he radar altimeter, which will tell

you if you'resinking, in w

hich case w.isdom

would dictate that you depart the

aIicraft with som

e haste.O

f course, it would be unthinkable to talk like that because, for

one thing, anybody could understand you. For another, it w

ould be

terrifying.A

nd after all that, there is still the little matter of landing the

aircraft, because, as my father used to say, takeoff is optional but

landing is mandatory. Y

ankovich explained the most salient

points: "You're at a quarter m

ile and someone asks you w

ho yourm

other is: you don't know. T

hat's how focused you are. O

kay, callthe balL. N

ow it's a knife fight in a phoue booth, A

nd remem

ber:full pow

er in the wire. Y

our IQ rolls hack to that of an ape."

It sounds as if he's being a smart-ass (he is), but deep lessons

also are there to be teased out like some obscure T

almudic script.

Lessons aboiit survival, about w

hat you need to know and w

hat youdon't need to know

. About the surface of the brain and its deep

recesses. About w

hat you know that you don't know

you know and

about what you don't know

that you'd better not think you know.

Call it an ape, call it a horse, as Plato did. Plato understood that

emotions could trurnp reason and that to succeed we have to use

the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. T

hat turns out to berem

arkably close to what m

odern research has begun to show us,

and it works both w

ays: The intellect w

ithout the emotions is like

the jockey without the horse.

My father didn't fly after the w

ar, and he hardly ever talkedabout it as such, but w

hen he did, I listened. He used to say, "V

\lien

you walk across the ram

p to your airplane, you lose half your IQ."

T alw

ays wondered w

hat he meant, hut instinctively I felt it. V

Vhen

I was a new

pilot, I'd get so excited before a flight that rd get tuii-

r

30 HO

W A

C ( ID

E N

T S

HA

P P

EN

net vision. I'd look at a checklist and be unable to read beyond thefirst item

: Check J\laster Sw

itch--ff. Sometim

es rd just sit therein the left seat, hyperventilating. A

fter yeaTs of w

orking at it, fly-ing upside dow

n, fiying jets and helicopters, and having a few"confidence builders," I got to the point w

here nearly every flightw

as almost pure joy. 1 say alm

ost because, even today, there is the

residual anxiety before each flight, the knot in the stomach, that

tells me I'm

not a fool, that 1 know rin taking a caleulated risk in

pitting my skill and control against a com

plex, tightly coupled,unstable system

with a lot of energy in it. I'll alw

ays be the tinyjockey on a half-ton of hair-trigger m

uscle. Fear puts me in m

yplace. It gives m

e the humility to see things as they are. I gel the

same feeling before I go rock clim

bing or surfing or before I slapon m

y snow board and plunge off into a hackcountry w

ildernessthat could sw

allow m

e up and not spit me out again.

So Yankovich w

as telling his pilots something that w

as not onlyvery im

portant to their survival but that is scientifically sound: Be

aware that you're not all there. Y

ou are in a profoundly alteredstate w

hen it comes to perception, cognition, m

emory, and em

o-tion. H

e was trying to keep them

calm w

hile letting theiIl facereality. H

e'd seen people die. He knew

the power of the horse, and

these were his precious jet jockeys.

WH

AT

YO

U really need to know

for survival purposes-whether

it's in a jet or in the wilderness-is that the system

we call em

o-tion (from

the Latin verb em

overe, "to move aw

ay") works pow

er-fully and quickly to m

otivate behavior. Erich M

aria Rem

arquedescribed it perfectly in A

ll Quiet on the W

estern Front, in which

he fictionalized his experiences at the front in World V

Var I:

At. the sound of the first droning of the shells w

e rush back,

in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal

instinct that .is awakened in W

ì we are led and protected. It is not

UlOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES" 31

conscious; it .is far quicker, much niore sure, less fallible, than

consciousness. One cannot explain it. A

man is w

alking alongw

ithout thought or heed-suddenly hc throws him

self down on

the ground and a storm of fragm

ents flies harmlessly oyer

him-yet he cannot rernem

ber either to have heard the shellcorning or to have thought of flinging him

self down. B

ut had henot abandoned him

self to the impulse he w

ould now be a heap

of inangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in us, that has

thrown us to the ground and saved us, w

ithout our knowing how

.

If it were not S0, there w

ould not be one man alive from

Flan-ders to the V

osges.

Now

we can explain it, at least better than w

e could \vhenR

emarque w

rote his noveL. E

motion is an instinctive response

aimed at self-preservation. It involves nuiiierous bodily changes

that are preparations for action. The nervous system

fires Jnoreenergetically, the blood changes its chem

istry so that it can coagu-late m

ore rapidly; muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various

chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for

whatever needs to be done. A

ll of that happens outside of con-scious control. R

eason is tentative, slow, and fallible, w

hile emo-

tion is sure, quick, and unhesitating.T

he oldest medical and philosophical m

odel, going back to the

Greeks, w

as of a unified organism in w

hich mind w

as part of andintegral to the body, Plato, on the other hand, thought of m

indand body as separate, w

ith the soul going on aftcr death. Aristotle

brought them back together again. B

ut it seems that people have

been struggling with the split for a very long tim

e indeed, proba-bly because they innately feel as if they have rninds that arc soine-how

distinct from their bodies_ A

fter the Renaissance, a C

artesianrrlO

del emerged, in w

hich the lIiind existed alone, had no location,

and was com

pletely independent of the body. To the neuroscien-

tist, the brain is no longer seen as separate but is now considered

an integral part of the body, no less so than heart, lungs, and liver.

32HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

Moreover, m

any researchers now regard w

hat we experience as

mind and consciousness as a side effect (albeit a useful one in evo-

lutionary terms) of the brain's synaptic functioning. Certainly

they all agree that the brain is as affeeted by ihe body as the bodyis by the brain. T

n fact, the brain is created in pail by the bony (the

other main influence being the environm

ent) in the sense thatw

hat the brain does or is capable of doing comes from

its synapticconnections, and those connections are forged through w

hat thebrain com

es to know of t.he body and the environm

ent. Thinking

is a bodily function, as are emotions and feelings.

As A

ntonio R. D

amasIo points out in his best-selling hook on

the brain, IJescartes' Error, "I think, thereforc I am

" has become

"I aTH

, therefore i think." The brain is the only organ that has no

clear function. It rnakes you breathe, but it's not part of the respi-ratory system

. It controls blooù pressurc and circulation, but it'snot part of the circulatory system

either. The concept of body has

no iiicaning without the brain and its extensive netw

ork of projec-tions that T

each to nearly every cell. As an em

inent neuroscient.ist,D

amasio is as qualified as anyone to define the brain, and he calls

it an" 'organ' of inforrriation and government." H

e put the word

"organ" in quotes because it's not exactly an organ either.T

he information he w

rites about is of three kinds: information

about the environment, inform

ation about the body, and infornia-tion about the good or bad eon sequences of interactions betw

eenthe tw

o. The term

"governnient" refers to the fact that the brain'sfunctions are largely regulatory in nature. T

he brain provides acontinuously changing kaleidoscope of im

ages concerning thestate of the environrnent and the state of the body. It receivesim

ages from receptors in the body and from

the sense organs thattake in the outside w

orld. (The im

ages can be smells, sights,

sounds, or feelings). At the sam

e time, the brain provides a stream

of outputs that shape the body's reactions to the environment and

to itself, from adjusting blood pressure to m

ating. So the brainreads the state of the body and m

akes fine adjustments, even w

hile

"LOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

33

it reaùs the environment and directs the body in reaeting to it. In

addition, that process continually reshapes the brain by mak ing-

new connections. A

ll of this is aimed at one thing only: adaptation,

which is another w

ord tor survivaLT

he brain does that job mostly throug-h unconscious learning_ It

learns, or adapts, by strengthening- the electrochemical transrnis

sions aniong neurons and creating new sites at w

hich neurons cancO

lnrnunicatc ..'v.ith each other. AX

OIlS

(the fibers that send signals)

grow and f(U

ff new branches and synapses. M

emory is the result.

Doing alinost anything g-encrates new

links ainong neurons_ The

process of learning something and the essence of m

emory has been

observed by neuroscientists in the lab: Genes niake new

proteins inorder to store inform

ation, and they make new

proteins in order tobring that. inform

ation back as a mem

ory. This process is called

"reconsolidation/' because, as Joseph LeD

oux, a neuroscientist andauthor of T

he ,SY

naptic Self; put it, "the brain that does the rem

em-

bering is not the brain that formed the initial m

emo!'y. In ordcr for

the old niclIlOry to m

ake sense in the current brain, i.he mem

ory has

to be updated." This is one reason ,"vhy m

enlOry is notoriously faulty.

There is a new

split, too, between cognition and em

otion. "Cog-

nition" means reason and conscious thought, m

ediat.ed by lan-guage, im

ages, and logical processes. "Em

otion" refers to a specificset of bodily changes in reaction to thc environm

ent, the body, or

to images prodlJced by niernory. C

ognition is capable of inakingfine calculat.ons and abstract distinctions. E

motion is capable of

producing powerful physical actions.

The hum

an organism, then, is like a jockey on a thoroughbred

in the gate. He's a sm

all man and it's a big horse, and if it decides

to get excited in that small m

etal cage, the jockey is going to getrnang-led, possibly killed. S

o he takes great care to be gentle. The

jockey is reason and the horse is emotion, a c.om

plex of systems

bred over eons of evolution and shaped by expp.rIence, which exist

for your survivaL. They are so pow

erful, they can make you do

things you'd never think to do, and they can allow you to do things

34HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

you'd never believe yourself capable of doing. The jockey carlL

win w

ithout the horse, and the horse cöill race alone. Tn the gate,

they are two, and it's dangerous. B

ut when they run, they ayc one,

and it's positively godly,

The horse can be am

azingly strong. On .~

'v1other's Day 1999, S

aint

John Eberle and his partner, "'larc B

everly, were clim

bing in .IewVrexico's Sandia :\iountaIn 'Vilderness when a rock ,veighing ill

are

than 500 pound~ fell on Eberle, pinning hirn. B

everly watched as

Eberle lifted the rock off of him

self. Of course, no one can lift a

500-pound rock. Then again, E

berle did it. ""hen I was reporting on

airline accidents in the 19808, an inve~tigator told H

Ie of findingdead pilots w

ho had ripped the huge control columns out of juinbo

jets while trying to pull up thp. nose of a crippled plane.

That horse can either vm

rk for us or against us. it can win the

race or explode in the gate. So it is learning when to soothe and

gentle it and when to let LL run that m

arks the winnI ng jockey, the

true survivor. And that is w

hat the dark humor of various subcul-

tuxes is all about: It's about gentling the beast, keeping it cool; andw

hen it's time to run, it's about letting it flm

\i-, about having emo-

tion and reason in perfect balance. That's w

hat characterizes eliteperformers, from Tiger VVoods to Neil Armstrong.

There are prim

ary emotions and secondary em

otions. Primary

cmotions are the ones you're born w

ith, such as the drive to obtainfood or the reaction of reaching out to grab som

ething if you feelyourself falling. B

ut the emotional system

of bodily responses canbe hooked up 1.0 anything. R

emarque's soldiers learneù to connect

a deeply instinctive emotional response to the w

histling of a shelL.

There w

cre no high-explosive shells when erIlotioii evolved, but it

is handily recruited into the task of avoiding them after only a fevl'T

experiences to niake the connection. The connection, once m

aòe, isso profound that t.aking the necessary action requires no thoughtor w

ill; it ,,"arks automatically. T

he proof that it's a secondary andnot a priuiary em

otion is that the new recruits didn't have the

same reaction, and they died by the score as a result.

"LOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

35

Rem

arque's observation, and the neuroscience that has con-firm

ed it, can ilhuninate the way accidents happeil. If an experi-

enced river runner is pitched into the water, he w

ill turn on hisback and float w

ith his toes out of the water, riding on the buoy-

ancy of his life vest. An inexperienced onei like a drow

ning sw lrIl-

mer, w

Lll reach up to wave or try to grab som

ething. Raising his

arms causes his feet to sink.

Forty-four-year-old Peter Duffy died on June 16, 1996, while

rafting on the Hudson R

iver, and his accident illustrates howim

portant it is not only to control criiotIons but to develop theappropriate secondary em

otions. "'He ¡D

uffyJ fell into the river,"w

rote Charlie W

albridge, who publishes R

iver Safeiy Report.

"Facing upstreani, he attem

pted to stand, caught his right footbetw

een two rocks, and w

as pushed under. His life jacket w

asstripped off, and he w

as trapped under three feet of water. . . . F

oot

entrapment rescues are very difficult. Y

ou might as w

ell step infront of a speeding car as get your foot caught in a fast m

ovingriver. T

he victim w

as warned, but failed to follow

instructions."D

uffy knew, intellectually, w

hat he should have done, Hut know

-ing w

as no match for em

otion.

FEA

R is but one ernotion. T

he instinct to reproduce is another,and it initiates a remarkably similar set of visceral responses,

though with striking differences involving the sex organs and

glands. Anyone w

ho has ever fallen in love, fallen hard, knows

what Y

ankovich nieans when he says, "Y

our IQ rolls back to that of

an ape." Em

otion takes over from the thinking part of the brain,

the neocortex, to effect an instinctive set of responses necessary for

survival, in this case reproduction.D

uring a fear reaction, the amygdala (as w

ith most structures in

the brain, there are two of them, one in each hemisphere), in COD-

cert with num

erous other structures in the brain and body, help totrigger a staggeringly com

plex sequence of events, all ainied at pro-

36HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

dueing a behavior to promote survival; freezing in place, for exam

-pie, follow

ed by running away. vV

hen the reaction begins, neuralnetw

orks arc activated, and nuiiierous cherriical cornpounds arereleased and nioved around in the brain and body. The niost well-

knovirn among them

is the so-called adrenaline rush. Adrenalin is a

trade iianie for epinephrine, and adrenaline is a synonym for ii, but

neither is used much in scientific circles. E

pinephrine and norepi-

nephrine, which com

e from the adrenal giands~ are in a class of

compounds called catecholam

ines, which have a ,vide range of

effects, including constricting blood vessels and exciting or inhibit-ing the firing of nerve cells anù the contraction of sm

ooth muscle

fibers. Bul il is norepinephrine (not adrenaline or epinephrine) that

is largely responsible for the jolt you feel in the heart when startled.

Cortisol (a steroid), ,vhich is released from

the adrenal cortex, alsoam

ps up fear, anlOng its othcr effects. T

he nel resull of all ihechem

icals that come stream

ing through your system once the

arnygdala has detected danger is that the heart rate rises, breathingspeeds up, m

ore sugar is dumped into the m

etabolic system, and the

distribution of oxygen and nutrients shifts so that you have thestrength to run or iïghL

):ou're on afterburner. The knot in ihe st.om

-ach Y

ankovich mentioned results from

that redistribution (as well

as (roin contractions of the sriiooth rnuscle in the stomach), in

which the flow

of blood to the digestive system is reduced so that it

can be used elsewhere to m

eet the emergency. (E

xcellent descrip-

tions of this very complex system

can be found in Joseph LeD

oux's

books, The E

motional B

rain and The Synaptu &

lf IIe refers to theam

ygdala as "'the centerpiece of the defense system.")

Evolution t.ook m

illions of years to come up w

ith emotional

responses. It has Ilot yet had tune to corne up with an appropriate

survival response for ~avy fighter pilots on quarter-mile final, try-

ing to land a 50,OO

O-pound stovepipe on the heaving deck of a ship.

Peter Duffy's lack of control over his emotional response

allowed him

to drown him

self in the Hudson R

iver. The fighter

pilot who slam

med into the back of the C

arl I/inson was the vic-

"LOOK OUT. HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

37

tini of a sIniilar effect. A secondary em

otion got the best of him on

the approach to the boat. For w

hatever reason, he was not exercis-

ing t.he necessary control, and he let the plane get too low. I know

how it ,\yorks. rve done it m

yself: 1\10st pilots have. Fear in thecuckpit, as Y

ankovich put it, is a knife fight in a phone booth. You

literally have to fight to rnove your frozen hand to correct the mis-

take that you see developing before your eyes. You are split.

~:¡any tinies before, the pilot m

Ust have had the sensatiun of

turn-buckle twisting terror, follow

ed by the cool flood of reliefupon landing. E

ven as the hormones produced under stress disrupt

perception, thinking, and the formation and retrieval of m

emo-

ries, they set a potentially dangerous trap by exciting the aniyg-dala. T

hey help to dampen explicit (conscious) inem

ory evenw

hile creating and recalling implicit (unconscious) niem

ories with

greater efficiency. As the fear rises, you becom

e more unable to

deal with it because you're not even aw

are of the learning that'spropelling you. L

eDoux refers to this as a "hostile takeover of con-

sciousness by emotion" as the "am

ygdala cmnes to dom

inate work

iug menlO

r)"." The body know

s where safety is, and w

hen you're a

rookie and really afraid, any successful landing carries w

ith it anexplosive, alm

ost orgasmic sense of release. T

he pilot had devel-oped a pow

erful secondary elllOtion, w

hich told him that safety

and even ecstasy could be found on the ground (or the deck) and

that if he could just get the hell down, he'd be all right. H

e had atrue and physical m

eiilOry of that sensation, w

hich was a pow

erfulnlO

tivator of behavior developed by coupling that experience with

a primary em

otional state. He also had an intellectual know

ledgethat if you land w

hen you're already low and slow

, you might die.

Unfortunately, he had no secondary em

otion for that, since he hadno experience of it. It w

as an abstract idea, forebrain stuff. It couldnot com

pete as a motivator of behavior.

'.'hen a pilot hits the "round down," as they call the back of the

boat, it's called a "ramp strike." A

s one pilot who flew

in the war

oil Iraq said, "Those are bad and deadly." H

e explained the way it

38HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

happens. The pilot focuses too much on the thing that he feels 15

most im

portant at that mom

ent: the deck. Hom

e_ It's called "spot-

ting the deck," because it breaks up the natural flO\'i! of his scan,

which ought to include his m

eatball, line-up, airspeed, altimeter,

and angle of attack. Once he fixes on his landing area, he's done for.

The pilot's rising cin,re of fear 'ivent off the charts in one direc-

tion, wh ¡Ie the rising curve of his m

otivation toward the deck

went off the charts in the other. T

he jockey lost control of thehorse in the gate.

Experienced travelers in the w

ilderness and people who engage

in risky activities understand.

In 1910, two B

ri6sh explorers, Aps-

ley Cherry-G

arrard and Robert Falcon Scott, set off for the South

Pole. Scott died on that expedition. In praising his traveling com-

panions, Cherry-G

arrard wrote that they "displayed that quality

\\/hich is perhaps the only one \vhich may be said w

ith certainty toniake for success, self-control." Ilm

v well you exercise that control

often decides the outcome of survival situations. W

hether it rneansm

aking a split-second decision while scuba- or skydiving or keep-

ing your head ,vhile stranded in the wilderness, it is the m

ostim

portant skill to take along. And ,vith m

ore and niore novicesgoing into the w

ilderness for fun, the severe penalties that cOlne

with a failure of control are becom

ing evident in the increasingnum

ber of search and rescue operations that are launched to savethem

or recover their bodies.

STR

ESS R

EL

EA

SES cortisol into the blood, It invades the hip-

pocampus and interferes w

ith its work. (L

ong-term stress can kill

hippocarripal cells.) The am

ygdala has powerful connections to the

sensory cortices, the rhinal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and theventral prefrontal cortex, w

hich means that the ent.ire m

emory

systeni, both input and output, are affected. As a result, m

ost peo-ple are incapable of perform

ing any but the simplest tasks under

stress. They can't rem

ember the m

ost basic things. In addition,

"LOOK OUT. HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

39

stress (or any strong emotion) erodes the ability to perceive. C

orti-sol and other horm

ones released under stress interfere with the

working of the prefrontal cort.ex. T

hat is where perceptions are

processed rind decisions are made. Y

ou see less, hear less, iniss more

cues from the environm

ent. and make m

istakes. Cnder extrerne

stress, the visual field actually narrmvs. (Police officers w

ho havebeen shot report tunnel vision.) Stress causes m

ost people to focusnarro\vly on the thing that they consider mosl. important, and it

may be the w

rong thing. So while the fighter pilot 'vas fixed oil

landing, he very well m

ight not have seen the lights or even heardthe LS

O's voice telling him

to go around. The organism

was doing

what it knew

hm.v to do best: escape danger and get to safety as fast

as possible. The rest of the input becam

e irrelevant noise, effi-ciently screened out by the brain. So he hit the boat.

I did something very like that w

hen 1 ,"vas a new pilot. I w

as onapproach to landing at. m

y home airport w

hen th(~ controller told

rrle I was on a collision course w

ith another plane. But I w

as sofocused, so fearful, that 1

literally didn't. hear hirri. I heard I1othing.and 1 didn't even see the plane. H

e called me on the radio three

times, and fortunately, m

y friend Jonas, "\vho was sitting beside rrie,

told ine that the controller wanted an iniiediate right turn. T

hetask of just getting the hell down had he corne so llIiportant--o

eniotional1y lIlotivated-that it occupied what neuroscientists call

"working rnem

ory" (which in effect rneans consciousness or atten-

tion) to the exclusion of other stIrriuli. Only because Jonas w

as soclose to m

e and could comm

and my attention by punching m

e in thearm

'vas he able to break the lock I had put on "vorking mem

ory.

Em

otions arc survival mechanism

s, but they don't ahvays work

for i,he individuaL. They w

ork across a large nun1ber of trials tokeep the species alive. T

he individual may live or die, but over a few

niillion years, more m

aniiiials lived t.han died by letting eUlO

tion

take over, and so emotion "vas selected. For people w

ho are raised inm

odern civilization, the wilderness is novel and full of unfam

iliarhazards. 'l() survive in it, the hody m

ust lcaruand aùapt.

40HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

Although strong em

otion can Ùitcrfere w

ith the ability to reason,

emotion is also necessary for both reason ing and learning. E

motion

is the source of both success and failure at selecting correct actionat the crucial m

orncnt. To survive, you m

ust develop secondaryem

otions that function in a strategic balance with reason.

One w

ay to promote that balance is through hum

or.

EVE RY PU RSU IT has its own suhculture, from hang gliders and

steep creek boaters to cavers and mountain bikers. T

love their darkand private hum

or, those ritual mom

ents of horriage to the organ-isin, w

hich return us to a protective state of cool. It unequivocallyseparates the hving from

the dead.V

Vlien I w

as fighting fires with the C

hicago Fire D

epartIIlcnt,trying to learn som

ething about how to be cool w

hile going up inflam

es, T asked one of thp. m

p.n why he becam

e a firefighter. "I like

to wreck things," he said. A

s we sm

ashed window

s after puttingout a huuse fire, I believed him

, too. VV

c had an old-timer at the

firehouse I was w

orking out of, Bernie '",'as his nam

e, who

wouldn't even put on his K

evlar turnout coat. He'd fall asleep in

the truck on the way to a fire, and w

hen one of us comm

ented onit, B

ernie said, "I could sleep with m

y dick slamm

ed in a door."B

ernie wasn't the only one, either. T

he guys called the big beercooler in the kitchen "the baby coffin." T

hey had dozens of names

for different types of corpses-"crispy critters," "stinkers,""fluaters," "dunkers," and "H

eadless Horsem

en," just to name a few

.

Butch Farabee, national em

ergency services coordinator for theN

ational Park Service, told of taking his friend, \Nalt D

abney, onhis first body recovery in Y

oseinite (there arc a lot of them). T

hey

found the man they w

ere looking for, R.ick, after he'd been dead (l

week. ''It w

as just terrible," Farabee said. "His body w

as quiveringw

ith maggots. H

e was as stiff as a basted turkey, too; w

e had tobreak his arm

s to get him into the hody hag. ''''hen w

e lowered the

body bag over a cliff, we dropped him

. V\T

alt and I had 1.0 spend the

"LOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES"

41

night out there with the body. I started talking to it, saying, 'H

ey,

Rick, ho,","s it going today? S

orry about dropping you.' VV

altthought I w

as either terribly disrespectful or out of my gourd. T

hefact is you have to deC

lI with these things to the best of your ability.

If you don't work w

ith it, it'll get you. A dead body is not som

e-thing you get used to."

Some high-angle rescue w

orkers call body bags "long-termbivvy sacks." It sounds cruel, but survivors laugh and play, andeven in the m

ost horrible situations-perhaps especially in thosesituations-they continue to laugh and play. T

o deal with reality

YO

ll must first recognize it as such, and as S

iebert and others havepointed out, play put.s a person in toiich w

ith his enviroiunent,w

hile laughter makes the feeling of being threatened m

anageable.T

he grotesque humor of the fïghter pilots, then, that secret lan-

guage, contains truths we don't even know

we kno\'... :i1oods are

contagious, and the einotional states involved with smiling,

humor, and laughter are am

ong the niost contagious of alL. Laugh-

ter doesn't take conscious thought_ It's autornatic, and one person

laughing or sniiling induces the same reaction in others. L

aughterstim

ulat.es the left prefront.al cortex, an area in the brain that helps

us to feel good and to he inotIvated. That stiniulatiori alleviates

anxiety and frustration. There is evidence t.hat laughter can send

chemical signals to actively inhibit the firing of nerves in the

amygdala, thereby dam

pening fear, Laughter, then, can help to

temper negative em

ot.ions. And w

hile all this might seem

ofpurely academ

ic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner

breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain.

It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from

therest of u.s. T

hey're afraid, t.oo, but they're not overwhelm

ed by it.T

hey manage fear_ T

hey use it to focus on taking correct action.l\like 'lyson's trainer, G

us U'A

mato, said, "Fear is like fire. It can

cook for you. Tt can heat your house. O

r it can burn you down.ll

And T

yson hiuiself said that fear was '~like a snap, a little snap of

light T get w

hen I fight I love that feeling, It makes m

e feel secure

r

42 HO

W A

ce IDE

N T

5 HA

P P

EN

and confident, iL suddenly makes everything explosive. It's like:

;HeT

c it comes again. H

ere's iliy buddy today.'" It's a dangerousplace to he, too. C

ontrol can easily slip away, as T

yson's unusualbehavior \vill attest.

I've spent the better part of my life w

orking around people who

risk dying a horrible ùeath of their own iiiak-ing. T

hey see it.T

hey're near it. They all have friends w

ho have gone that way.

And they all have a strategy for avoiding IL

---a strange amalgani of

superstition, knowledge, illusion, and confidence. H

ut everyonebegins w

ith the same m

achinery, the same basic organism

, andvvhen it's threatened, w

heihcT in pursuit of pleasure, for duty and

honor, or by accident, the organism reacts in predictable w

ays. It is

only by iiianaging and working w

ith those predictable, inhorIireactions that you're going to survive. You can't fight them,

because ihey are ,,,ho you arp.

RIG HT B EFO R E tbe planes launched off the Carl Vinson, follow-

ing the 1800 briefing in Ready N

ine, I went to dinner ,,,ith lV

IikeY

ankovich and a group of fliers in the officers' mess, ensuring that

v.1e'ù have t.hat knot in our stomachs. A

fter we'd finished eating, a

'~raiter lT

i a white coat cam

e to the lable, and every officer sitting

around iue said one ..vord to him: "D

og.""V

hen they'd finished, ihe waiter turned to nie and asked, "D

og,sir?""S

ure," I said. Then, as the w

aiter left, Tasked l\like, "V

Vhafs

dog?"

"Auto-dog," he said. "It's soft-serve ice cream

. T ,ike U

airy

Queen. "I asked w

hy it was callt~

d dog.

"Go over and w

atch it come out. of the iiiadiliie," he said.

Survival, then, is about being cooL. It's about laughing w

ith anattitude of bold hum

ility in the face of something terrifying. Ils

about knmving the deepest processes of the brain, even if, as noIl-

N L 0 0 K OUT, HER E COM E 5 RAY (H A R L E 5 " 43

scientists, W~ can explain theni only through the darkest hum

orim

aginable.So here they are., these F-1R

pilots, about to go up and possiblydie doing som

et.hing horribly risky in the unholy night., and theyare joking i.hat for dessert they eat feces.

It's an olù habit. Rcm

arque "'"'ote, "'lVe m

ake grim, coarse jests

about it, when a nian dies, then w

e say he has nipped off his turù,and so w

e spe.ak of everything; that keeps us from going m

ad; aslong as w

e take it that \vay we m

aintain our own resistance."

AN

H 0 U

R after dinner, I stand on the LS

O platform

and Yankovich

holds the pickle switch high, the heavy telephone halH

bet pressedto his ear. V

Vé w

atch a nervous pilot come w

obbling in. I haven'teven m

entioned the remarkable skill and perception it takes for

Yankovich to know

, by eyeball alone in the asphalt night, ,,,hether

or not the black bat we see unfolding before us is going to hit the

correct wire. B

ut this pilols approach looks really bad. Even I can

telL.Through m

y headphones I hear Yankovich say, "Look out, here

comes R

ay Charles."

As he releases the pickle s"ritch trigger to send the pilot around

for another try, Yankovich ùoes a few

dance steps, his head lollingaround like a blind m

an's, reeling there on the tiny LSO

platformseven stories above the heaving of the. m

eterless sea.Y

ankovich and I turn and watch the jet shoot off the other end

of the boat, engines roaring. The plane dips a bit, and w

e wait

until it's securely back in the air. Then Y

ankovich says to me, ~'noy,

did you see hirn settLe? H

e'll be picking the seat ciishion out of hisasshole about now

."

FIFTE

EN

THE DAY OF

TH

E F

ALL

TH

AT

VE

CT

OR

LEA

DIN

G to survival, w

hich Joe Sim

pson andSteve C

allahan took, stretches back into childhood. To enter the

wilderness, to challenge the forces of nature, w

e must be w

orthy,

and worthiness doesn't com

e from a w

eekend survival school, theE

agle Scouts, or even a few years in the m

ilitary. Peter Leschak

wrote, "In fire and other em

ergency operations, you must not

merely tolerate uncertainty, you m

ust savor it. Or you w

on't lastlong. T

he most efficient preparation is a general m

ental, physical,and professional readiness nurtured over years of training and

experience. You live to live. Preparing is itself an activity, and

action is preparation." He's talking about m

aking himself w

orthyof suivival, and his w

ay of doing it in the wilderness is w

ith theadded burden of firei just as m

y father's manner of flying, itself an

act of survval, was to do it w

hile people were shooting at him

.I first learned about being w

orthy from m

y father. I learnedagain ,,,hen T

became a pilot. A

nd again when I becam

e an instru-inent pilot, a com

mercial piloti and then an aerobatics pilot. Fly-

ing bush pilot planes in the Arctic regions of A

laska-the Brooks

THE DAY OF THE FAll 261

Range and on up the coast past 'V

ain\vright to Barrow

-I learneditoo, about indifferent forces that punish inattention or arrogance.'V

hen I was com

peting with the T

nternational Aerobatics C

lub,even as I saw

those around me being killed, 1 realized that I had to

be at once bold and humhle, that I had to open m

y mind to this

energetic world, w

hich never sits still, the complex churning of its

materials, from

which I'd m

ade my ow

n Braille language of life.

1\1)' father \vas too badly injured in his crash to continue as apllO

l and went back to school to becom

e a medical school professor,

a scientist. I followed him

to the University of T

exas, then to Bay-

lor J\ledical School and at last to Northw

estern, and grew up w

ork-ing in his labs, eventually operating an electron m

icroscope andpeering w

ith him into the very m

achinery of human cells. I'd go

to his classes so that I'd be able to speak his language, the languageof science. V

Vheri he took the podium

, he always began by saying,

"Fellow students. . ." H

e taught rne the humility of know

ing thatw

e \vere all, always, students, and that to stop being a student w

as

to stop living."T

hen he turned seventy years old, I was hot and heavy on the

contest circuit with the International A

erobatics Club. I took him

up for his birthday to show hiiu rny routine of spins, loops, rolls,

hamm

erheads, Cuban eights, Im

melm

ansi and split-5's, a continu-

ous corkscrewing of the airplane, w

hich let one maneuver lead

into the next in a sort of high-octane gasoline ballet.A

plane is a noisy, stinking thing to those on the ground, but tothe pilot it can som

etinies seem absolutely silent, like a sailboat

(until you hear the wrong sound, and then it gets YOUT prompt

attention). On that flight, m

y father sat quietly III the tandem seat

as I ripped the plane through four and five G's, clim

bing, descend-

ing, rolling, and falling through the hard air, switching blue sky

for green earth a dozen times a ininute as the sm

ooth beauty ofthe w

hirling world filled m

e with w

onder and joy, It didn't feel asif I flew

the plane. It felt as if I'd become the plane; the w

ingtipshad nerves.

262SU

RV

IVA

L

I\1y brother l\lìchael, one of my father's students and a physi-

cian, had expressed some concern that the G

-forces might be bad

for our father at his age. But w

hen 1 was done and m

y wheels

barked onto the asphalt, my father clim

bed out and said, "You're a

really good pilot." lie did not give praise idly, It was one of the

n10st iTIiportant iiiom

cnts iurny life. 1 was w

orthy. Air w

orthy.

W H

EN

PE

a P L E

hear about my father's survival, they think of the

long fall from Ù

ie sky or the mom

ent when that G

erman peasant,

standing on the stub of wing. pulled the trigger on his old pistol

and it niIsfired. But those singular events are not the point.

Sure, it takes luck to be a survivor, and luck 15 nothing m

ore

than the accumulation of circum

stance throughout a life. One

year, I arrived in Glacier N

ational Park to watch the biggest snow

clearing operation in the United States. T

he big bend near theapex of G

oing To T

he Sun Road can be 100 feet deep in snow

, andthe road is only tw

o lanes wide. A

valanches regularly rip throughthere, 1iometimes sweeping Ilicn and rnachines off into the

couloirs. As the w

eather wanns, the cliffs calve rocks the size of

automobiles. -:A

-s I settled in with the crew

i the snO\v boss told m

e

ihat the previous season, on the day the road opened, a 30-toli rockhad fallen onto a cari killing a .Japanese tourist ..\lhile sparing hisw

ife in the passenger seat next to him. A

nd 1 thought, All his life

he drove along roads to get to that exact spot at that exact InOIlient.

And so did his w

ife, who survived. B

ut her survival didnlt end atthat m

oment, it began there. H

er task was to survive the terrible

event, to go on and live her life. So with iiiy father. T

he lesson ofsurvival that I took from

his story was not that he w

as so lucky asto fall 27,000 feet and not die. It w

as t.hat he had to have thestrength to go on and live sixty inore years after losing his belovedbrothers, his crew

i after breaking his body into so many pieces,

öfter prison eaoip. He w

as twenty-three years old and had to forge

THE DAY OF THE FALL

263

a strategy for surviving everything else. I'd seen many of his fel-

low com

batants simply give up, collapsed old m

en, ,valking ghosts.T

hat the Gerrnan peasant's old and badly abused pistol jam

med

was sheer chance. E

verything after that was not.

As he lay there in a heap hy the rudder pedals, my father

watched his would-be assassin with a sort of dim, swooning

amusem

ent as the man tried to get the firing m

echanism sorted

out. Then m

y father began laughing, which infuriated the G

er-inan, w

ho was cursing a blue streak. M

y father was able to under-

stand Germ

an reasonably well and w

as struck by the movie-like

quality of the scene. It was all a bit m

uch; to get blown out of the

sky önd fall 27,000 feet without a parachute-and survive-only

to land in the exact spot where there's a pissed-off farm

er with a

gun, He couldn't stop laughing, It w

as the beginning of his salva-tion, not the end. H

umor w

as the key.A

Germ

an officer appeared and told the farmer that he could

not shoot the Am

erican pilot, who w

as officially a prisoner of theG

erman R

eich. There w

as an arguinent. Harsh w

ords. The peas-

ant said that the pilot deserved to die for bombing them

, and any-w

ay, he wasn't going to live long. L

ook at him. Indeed, his nose

had been cut off, he was bleeding profusely, and he w

as crumpled

in a bloody, mangled heap. H

e was obviously delirious. L

ook, he1slaughing.

VV

ile they were arguing about his fate, l\lrs. Peiffer cam

e outfrom

her farmhouse outside the tow

n of Neuss (now

a suburb ofD

üsseldorf), The front half of the B

-17 had eome dow

n on the sideof a railroad enibankm

ent that bordered her land, and she was

hopping mad. (T

he aft portion of the plane had crashed about halfa m

ile away w

ith soine of the crew, one of w

hom had lost his legs

somew

here in the sky.) She'd seen the whole thing from

her house.F

or some t.im

e now she had refused to take shelter against the air

raids. The G

erman soldiers w

ere all young, and the wom

an tookadvantage of her age, ordering t.hem

to care for the wounded pilot.

264SU

RV

IVA

L

MY FAT f1 E R awoke in the snow, laid out with some of his dead

crew. "I w

as in and out of consciousness," he told me. "B

ut I was

deliriously happy. lvlaybe it was because of iny injuries. l\:layhe

someone had given m

e morphine. I don't know

. But I felt no pain,

and I was just happy to be alive.'1

But to his left was Colonel Hunter, his cOTTimandant and co-

pilot for the day. lvly father was captain of the ship, and as such, he

was responsible for the safety of all on board. :K

ow H

unter laydead in the newly fallen SIlOW, and the lieutenant couldn't help

feeling guilty about how happy he w

as to be alive when all the rest

were dead.V

Vhilc he struggled ,,\lith the confusing eIflotions, he began vom

-

iting blood. He concluded that he rnust have internal injuries. Sud-

denly, his joy turned to terror as he realized thH-t he w

as going todie. A

fter all that, to perish in the snow. H

e began crying, and aG

-erman soldier, hiiself no m

ore than a boy, came over to see w

hatthe trouble w

as. He reached dow

n and flipped the Am

erican boy'snose back into place for him

. Although it had been cut ott by flying

glass or uietal, it had been hanging by a flap of skin, and now T

ny

father und6rstood: He'd been lying 011 his back, sw

allowing all the

blood from his nesh w

ound. That's w

hy he was throw

ing up. Once

more, he w

as overcome w

.ith joy: He w

as going to live!

He passed out again.

Mrs. Peiffer ordered the G

ernian soldiers to carry the .."ounded.A

.inerican lieutenant into her house, and when he aw

oke the next

time, they had laid hini befoT

e her fireplace. She gave him tea and

a cigarette. As both his arm

s, both hanùs, both feet, both legs, andnum

erolls ribs were broken, she had to hold the tea and help him

smoke his cigarette. A

nd he thought: This isn't going to be so bad.

1\1 aybe this is what G

erman prison cam

p is like, tea and c-garettesbefore a cozy fire.

Then a truck w

as pulled up to the house and he was throw

n into

THE DAY OF THE FALL

265

the back of it and driven overland. "As soon as w

e started bouncingacross that frozen ground," he said, "I could feel the broken bonesgrinding against each other." T

he pain was so excruciating that he

couldn't stop screaming until he m

ercifully passed out once more.

But each time he caie to, he awoke screaming.

At last they arrived at the prison cam

p near Gerresheim

, where

he was throw

n in a basement w

ith prisoners from all over E

uropeand A

merica. B

y chance, one of them, D

r. Géri, w

as a mem

ber ofthe French Resistance.

He w

as a surgeon and had been allowed

some m

eager medical supplies w

ith which to treat. the w

ounded.T

here were also a few

male nurses w

ho were allow

ed to work in

the crude lazaret.

Dr. G

éri \vired my father up w

ith piano wire and plastered him

all over until he looked

like a great albino spiùer hanging froni thebasem

ent ceiling beneath a single bare globe, which w

as strung on

a length of electric cord.In the ensuing days and w

eeks, Dr. G

éri would have to tighten

the wires-to tune the piano--and Tny father would scream as he

had not screaTned since the truck ride froni the crash site to the

cellar, When he begged for m

orphine, Dr, G

éri told him, "Is that

the way the babies scream

when you bom

b them? J\Iorphine .is for

heroes. Not for A

merican fliers w

ho bomb babies." T

hen he'd turna w

ire tighter, and my father w

ould scream louder. D

r. Géri w

as apacifist. So strange, thought m

y father, to be tortured by the Allies,

not the eneni)'. He had to love and hate D

r. Géri.

The E

ighth Air Force eontinued to stage its bom

bing raids onthe area, and ",rhen the bom

bers rum bled overhead, the light globe

above my father's bed w

ould start swinging as the 500-pounders

detonated around the camp. H

e'd watch the light bulb and listen

to his piano wires playa bizarre and dissonant tune, like B

artókj a

prelude, it seemed, to a direct hit that w

ould blow theT

n all to bits.If the bom

bs were close enough, the light w

ould swing so hard

that it would shatter against the ceiling and show

er him w

ith bro-ken glass,

266SU

RV

IVA

LTHE DAY OF THE FALL

267

By the time spring came

to the Germ

an farm fields, m

y father's

bones had knitted, and one of the very riiuscular male nurses, a

French prisoner nam

ed Henri ~

1oreoui would carry him

upstairsIi ke a baby and set hirn in the sun beneath a blanket. O

ne day inA

pril, he was sitting in his chair in the sun, the blanket over his

knees. It was a perfect day, w

ith just a few high clouds, A

front hadcom

e through and cleared away the sm

ells of waT

, which som

c-tiuies hung over them

. The sun w

as warm

and the air was cool.

lvly father was left alone w

ith the guards, who w

ere scatteredabout som

e distance away. H

e watched the far hilL

s, daydreaming

and almost dozing off. l\l05t of the dream

s were about food. T

heG

erman guards ate potatoes, w

hich was all that w

as left in thew

ar-torn countryside, and they gave the potato peelings to theprisoners to m

ake a thin soup. Slowly starving, m

y father foundthat he had becom

e obsessed with rnayonnaise, w

hich he loves tothis day. A

t other times, he'd daydream

about his mother, R

.osa,w

ho grew roses and painted and m

ade pottery, or the girl backhom

e, his fiancée and eventually iny mother, A

nna Marie l\1osher

(whose grandfather w

as a railroad worker and had been run over

by his own train-on his sixtieth birthday).

My father w

ould remem

ber his old dog, whose Ilam

e ,vas GI,

and his father, Agustín, com

ing home to R

osa after work, w

here he

made barbecue in a stone pit over a m

esquite wood fire and sold it

to the workers in the area. A

gustíri would sw

eep the front porchand steps in the afternoon light and then continue sw

eeping down

the sidewalk to the dirt street in the barrio w

here they lived,sw

eeping and sweeping, betw

een the rows of R

osa's roses.M

y father could hear the soft snap of playing cards to his left,w

here two guards w

ere engaged in a game. T

o his right, smne oth.

ers were just standing, staring into space, and two

more w

ere shar-

ing a cigarette. The hills w

ere turning green. He felt calm

, almost

happy, and quite distant from the incessant pain of an em

ptystoiiiach and knitting bones.

Something caught his eye on the top of the farthest hill. H

e saw

somp.thing m

ove. As he w

atched, a figure sp.emed to grow

out ofthe hill. A

man under a burden, w

alking, coiiiing from the far side,

now crest.ing the hill, now

advancing over its near side. The figure

was still too far aw

ay for my father to tell anything about it, but.

even at that distance, soiiiething about it struck my father as odd.

~ othing ever came over those hills. A

nd there was just. som

ethingfam

iliar in the movem

ent. Impossible. H

e was too far aw

ay to dis-tinguish any details except that the m

an labored under a largepack and other gear.

But m

y father was idle, dozing, and he had nothing to do other

than watch as the figure cam

e on and on. He didn't. know

howlong he w

atched the figure grow out of the new

green landscape.It fell into a depression betw

een two hills and vanished for a w

hile.T

hen it reappeared over the next. rise, larger, more distinct, and

my fat.her knew

that thp.re was definitely som

ething about it. He

sat forward in his chair: som

ething about t.he man's burden that.

my father just couldn't put his finger on. H

e wondered if he w

ashallucinating from starvation.

'Then the guards noticed, too; the card gam

e stopped and theothers stood at the ready. A

soldier ground out a cigarette with the

toe of his boot and ble\11, a thin stream of blue sm

oke into thew

indless air. His hand carne up to shade his eyes as he w

atched.T

hey formed a still tableau as the lone figure advanced across the

hills, coming now

through an open field of ye.llow flow

ers perhapsan eighth of a m

ile \...ide. He w

as dressed in green-gray, that much

was now

dear, and he was arm

ed. The top of his head w

as round,and suddenly m

y fat.hcT could see w

hy: He w

ore a helmet. T

hefield of yellow

blossoms seem

ed so enormous and bright, as if the

figure floater! on a bowl of !iquir! sun,

The guards drew

together into a group and placed theirSchm

eizers at the ready. Everyone w

as fixed so intently on thatlone figure, that personage, arriving, arriving, taking so long toarrive, and the accum

ulation of detail and meaning as he grew

larger, and the vast landscape around him and the yellow

field of

I

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flowers that seem

ed alternately to swallow

and offer him up as if

he floated on an ocean ,vave. He m

ight be an ant for all his mass,

and yet ho\v he coiiimanded their attention, as if they w

ere t.hem

emhers of a prim

itive cult awaiting at long last the returning

god of their mythology,

Perhaps tbose boys knew long before m

y father did what they

were looking at. T

he man w

as only 200 yards off when the injured

flier began to put together in his mind w

hat he was seeing. A

nd yethis iiiuddled m

ind would not believe iti and so he just stared

dumbly,

Then he could hear the clanking, canteen and bayonet, the tin-

kling of dog tags, P-38, tin cup. All the gear m

aòe a sort of rat-tling, atavistic m

usic, and the big rucksack shifted, boots shuffling,with that inimitable slack-limbed indolence-no, no one else can

walk like that, pose like that; it w

as unmistakable, for there w

asonly one breed of hurnan being the w

hole world over w

ho couldbe so unstrung yet gracefuL

. \lovies have been made, novels w

rit-ten, about nothing m

ore than that insouciant walk, that very care-

f:ee nonchalance with w

hich he ambled tow

ard them, that cool.

He w

as a mere 50 yards off w

hen my father's m

ind finallyengaged, and at that rnoiiient he looked around at the guards, fullyexpecting to see them

draw back the slides on their w

eapons andopen fire. B

ut what he saw

instead was the young faces, upturned,

the slack expressions, not of fear, but the relief of thank-God-its-

over, and as the lone figure advanced, they threw their w

eapons tothe ground and put their hands in the air.

The single G

T sauntered straight and cool and casual tow

ardthem

, and the guards stood stock-still in their surrender, as theA

.nicrican Arm

y scout crossed the compound yard tow

ard my

father, came right up to him

, and cast his shadow over him

so thatm

y father could at last see his face-big, crooked teeth in a leathergrin; soft, indefinite-colored hair falling across his tanned faceunder his helm

etj :Nl-1 rifle slung casually over his arm

.

Cbewing gum,

TH

E D

AY

OF T

HE

FAll

2'9

He grinned dow

n, hardly glancing at the Germ

ans. He shook a

smoke out of a pack of I.uckies and offered the w

ounded flier one.M

y father reached out and took it witb his left, his good hand, and

the GI flicked a Z

ippo with that inexpressible dexterity of tbe

combat veteran and lit the tw

o smokes, his ow

n, then my fathees,

cupping his hands tenderly around my father's thin fingers. T

heyboth blew

smoke out and stared at each other.

"Hello, G

I," the GJ said.

"You're a sight for sore eyes," m

y father said."Y

ou look like you could use a bite.""S

ure could.?l He w

as shaking all over, beset by a fever ofunknow

n origin.T

he GI dropped his pack, dug around in it, and cam

e up with

cheese and a chunk of coarse bread. He tore off som

e bread,handed it to the starving flier, and flicked out his gravity knife likea sw

itchblade to cut a thick slice of cbeese, My father fell to eating

it like a dog, gnawing furiously, groaning out loud because he

couldn't help hiinself, glancing up from bite to bite as if som

eonem

ight snatch it from him

. He noticed how

sad the Gl's grin w

as,and in it he saw

how bad he m

ust look, a ghost of himself, this flier

in a threadbare uniform, torn and bloodstained. H

e had beentaken prisoner w

eighing 170 pounds and went hom

e at 119.

FA

MI LI E

S, T

OO

, develop their own survival rituals, their codes of

integrity, ideas of what it m

eans to be worthy. V

Ven I w

as growing

up, my m

other would m

ake a special dinner every January twenty-

third to celebrate the date my father w

as shot down, and each year

I'd hear a little bit more of his im

probable story. (I'd somctIrnes

hear my father w

ake up screaming at nigbt, too.) A

nd although Iknew

the stories were true, I'm

not sure I could ever quite squarethe im

age I had of tbat boy falling out of the sky with the m

an hew

ould become. T

he proof was alw

ays before me. H

is right arm, the

one that was fixed w

ith a stainless-steel pin, moved only a few

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degrees at the elbow. W

hen he dove off the diving board into thesih-rm

ming pool, I could see how

crooked it was. (A

niazing that he

could walk, let alone dive.) A

nd when T

was very little and cam

e up

only to his knees, I saw the horrible scars running the length of his

shins. His feet w

ere so deformed from

the impact that they caused

one of my brothers, Philip, to burst into tears as a toddler. J\1y father

had to have special shoes made just to w

alk without pain.

The lesson, w

hich it took me m

any decades to learn, was that he

was here am

ong us because he was cool. H

e was cool now

and hadbeen cool at the m

oment of his death, saying nothing m

ore thanbad to be said: "T

his is it," and, "Bailout, bailout, bailout," as pre-

scribed on the checklist before him. A

s prescribed by the pilot'sunspoken Stoic code of conduct. H

e received the Distinguished

Flying Cross not for that last flight but for an earlier tim

e when he

was shot dow

n and saved his crew through cool and skill and

naked nerve. vVith tw

o engines Ollt, his radios gone, his plane's

\vings and tail shot to pieces, leaking fuel at a prodigious rate, hew

as inexorably descending through an overcast, recognizing thathe'd have to order his crew

to bailout, probably into the icy Eng-

lish ChanneL. T

hey had no idea where they w

ere, when he spied a

rocket punching through the overcast and turned toward the pink

glow. H

is wheels barked onto the asphalt runw

ay somew

here inB

elgium, just in tim

e for everything on his airplane to quit. His

happy crew partied there until daw

n, when the sound of w

oodenclogs stirred them

to head for bed as the local people went to w

ork.I have a photograph of him

with three m

embers of his crew

,taken at the base in N

uthampstead before a flght in 1944, C

harlesK

ahouri, who at that tirne w

as pilot to my father's co-pilot, stands

on his right. To his left are Jack L

ayden and Jack Kutch back, both

of whom

flew the last m

ission. Those three m

en are neat andsevere in their regulation uniform

s, their hats on straight, theirpostures m

ilitary. They look, w

ell, nervous, if not afraid, even asthey try to sm

ile. My father, by contrast, is not only out of uni-

form, he has no shirt on. H

e wears R

ay-Ban A

viators, his hat

THE DAY OF THE FALL

271

cocked at a rakish angle, one foot swung out before him

as if he'sabout to do a little dance step. H

e's grinning like the devil that I'mtold he w

as, I always looked at that photo and thought: W

hat inhell w

as he thinking? Many years later, I looked at it again and

realized that the other three were dead and he w

as alive.lIe hadn't let his injuries stop him

, either. Sunday morning, early,

he'd suddenly appear in the kitchen with a top hat and cane, doing

a soft shoe

and singing, "G

imm

ethat old... soft... shoe...," mak-

ing drum sounds and w

histling the backup hand arrangement.

VV

e'd squeal and clap, and then he'd twirl the cane around his fin-

ger like Diam

ond Jim the R

iverboat Gam

bler. He'd throw

down the

cane, grab up three eggs from am

ong the dozen my niother w

asabout to cook for breakfast, and he'd begin juggling, even as sheprotested that if he broke them

, he'd have to go out and get soniem

ore, and she wasn't about to clean this floor again, either.

Break them' Unthinkable,

Just to prove it, he'd juggle them behind his back, I had no

ùoubt that he haù been granted all of those abilities in one fellsw

oop by flying an airplane and being shot down. H

e had gone out

to ineet soiiiething terrible, and he had mastered it and had com

eback to be treated like a king by all t.hose around him

, to sit andsm

oke and to be suave, smart, handsorne. T

he same innate focus

örid attention that kept him from

dropping the eggs, that same

ability to be an elite perfollner, had also allowed him

to read the.Journal ~f C

ell Biology w

hile five (and then six, and then seven)sons raged around him

, wreaking havoc. T

hat couldn't be anyharder L

han reading an eIliergency cheeklist inverted at 27,000feet w

ith your left wing shot off w

hile you were spinning hard

enough to suck your eyeballs out.

I kn8\'1" that there ,"vas little hope that I would ever have such

righteous stuff. Certai nly, he \vas never going to explain it to m

e.A

viators didn't chat like that. But the \vliole thing w

as irresistible.I vm

s a child, but before I could even put a name on it 1 w

as deter-m

ined t.o steal my share.

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So it was that T

ended up riding dirt bikes at 125 miles an hour

on a dry lake bed in the l\1exican desert in a ,vhiteout dust starnI.

So it was that 1 w

ound up on a knife-edge cliff in a blizzard with

no tent in the middle of the night on the highest point easL

of theR

ockies. So it was that I found m

yself on a naked heap of chertsom

ewhere above the A

rctic Circle, clutching an autoniatic shot-

gun jamm

ed with nine rounds of alternating double-ought buck

a"tid deer slugs, awaiting the approach of a grizzly beaT

who'd

caught the scent of our fresh caribou meat. S

o it was that I v.round

up flying upside down, 10 feet off the ground, going 150 m

iles anhour, through an obstacle course in the S

anta Susana :\:T

ountains in

California. T

hen I'd write about it as best I could and give it to iny

father. Every ex-com

bat pilot has what they call an "I-L

ove-J\leR

aouL" In m

y father's den are his wings and Iliem

orabilia and thephotos of him

and his dead crew from

the bad old ArIllY

Air C

orps

days. Across from

that wall of glory, on a bookshelf, he keeps all

the things I've written. lV

ly daughters ten nie that I have the jobevery thirteen-year-old boy w

ants. 1\ly ex-\vives tell me that 1

never grew up.

Once he w

as shot down, m

y father's survival was not a m

atter ofcraw

ling up a mountain or catching fish in the A

tlantic, as it was

for Joe Simpson or Steve C

allahan. But I have to think that his

whole life had led him to that one point in an unconscious

sequence of circumstances, judgrnents, and acts, vi..~

hich combined

in the thrall of the forces that Clausewitz called friction and

chance, the bipolar pull that circumscribes and defines the uni-

verse. The road that leads a Japanese tourist to drive beneath a

falling 30-ton rock in Glacier N

ational Park stretches back to thefirst divisions of a zygote, even as it begins scraw

ling out the defi-nition of itself in lines of sugarcoated D

)JA.

That doesn't i-nean everything is fated; indeed, just the opposite.

It means the system

s we live w

ith are unpredictable and thereforehave profound and unexpected results. B

ut there are patterns inthere, too. T

he same boy w

ho rode his bicycle off a garage roof to

THE DAY OF THE FALL

273

see what w

ould happen, who joined the cavalry in high school to

feel the heat of the horse and the kick of the gun, had at lastachieved w

hat Leschak calls "an alm

ost mystical plane of aw

are-ness" in learning to lean on the ",vind, accept the speed and noiseand sm

oke, and to aim c¡:refully and shoot straight w

hile bothcalm

ing and thrilling t.o the complex ballet of w

hich lw w

as thesilent center, the jockey to the horse. T

o fly, then, he had to do the

same again in the sm

ell of oil, in the heat and smoke, and then

once inore teach his spirit to fly straight and level and calmly terri-

fied ",rhile explosions rocked his ship and razor-sharp, red-hot frag-

nlcnts of supersonic flak penetr¡:ted the thin ahrminum

skin of hisaircraft, punching sm

oky fingers of light into the darkness within.

And w

hen one of those fingers pointed out a man, it w

ould mean

to select him for sacrifice. T

he sweet, sharp, continuous anguish of

such learning had allowed him

to will him

self alive in t.he impos-

sible dream of air. "H

e \vorked out his o\vn .salvation."

Survival is a continuous spiritual and physical act that spans alifetinH

~. R

iding his bicycle off the roof and all the rich spinningof a w

hirlwind childhood taught m

y father how to falL

. Saving hiscrew

men in H

olland made him

worthy to lose them

over :Xeuss.

vVith good-hearted determ

ination, he not only rebuilt his own life.

he rebuilt his crew, .siring eight sons. Sadly, the first died in

infancy. But w

ith my father as captain, our fam

ily made nirie,

which "vas the very num

ber of men he had lost.

FIRST

LIE

UT

EN

AN

T Federico G

onzales was liberated from

theG

erresheim cam

p on Apri11?, ig45. It w

as alniost exactly thirty-four years later that I w

as writing for Playboy niagazine, doing

research on airline crashes and studying the flaws of one par6cu-

layly notorious airplane, the .;ÍcDonncll D

ouglas DC

-10, a popularjum

bo jet that had suffered more catastrophic in-flight failures

than any other modern jetliner. A

s a contributing editor for them

agazine, I was planning to join m

y colleagues on a trip to the

274SU

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American Booksellers Association Convention in L.A. She1 VVax,

our managing editor, w

as going. His w

ife, Judy, was going w

ithhim

to promote her first book, w

hich had just been published. Our

fiction editor, Vickie C

hen Haider, w

as going, as well as Q

ur for-eign rights editor, M

ary Sheridan. I was planning to join them

onArnerican Flight 191 to Los Angeles on the afternoon of lVlay 25,

1979. But w

hen I found out the airplane was a D

C-to, I told Shel

I'd thought better of it. He laughed and said I'd been reading too

much, H

e was right, I had. A

lthough I'd been flying in and out ofcrow

ded airspace in a small Piper aircraft for several years by then,

the idea of getting on a DC

-l0 terrified me.

That m

orning, I sat in Shel's office on the tenth floor of the oldPalulO

live Building, w

here Playbv,,'Y had its headq uarters. 1 w

astalking to Judy, w

ho was a good friend, She signed a copy of her

book for iilc. I said good-bye to Vickie, w

ho had a one-year-old son.

She and I often rode the bus to work together, I stopped in to see

Mary, too, and w

ish her a good trip, I watched She! and Judy go

out to the Art D

eco elevators walking ann in arnl. 1 rem

ember

thinking how cool it w

as that they were still so in love, w

hisperingand laughing like teenagers as they w

aited for the elevator.T

he flight lasted thirty-one seconds and crashed in an openfield, just m

issing a fuel-tank farm and a trailer park. T

he planerolled nearly inverted hefore it hit. the ground. E

veryone was

killed, 273 people, Tnaking it the w

orst aviation disaster i.n Am

eri-can history even now

, nearly a quarter century later. I lived onlyt.w

enty niinutes from the crash site and w

as there to report on itjust after the fire ,vas put out. V

ickie, beautiful Vickie: \vith her

straight black Chinese hair, had to be identiiïed by a bit of dental-

work.

The event launched m

e into an even iiioie intense period of fly-

ing and writing about. aviation. B

ut I was ahvays haunted by how

close I'd come to m

aking my life exactly m

atch my father\. T

hadalw

ays followed hiin, follow

ed his example, tried to be like hirn. I

thought of myself as the hero's apprentice. B

ut later on, J hegan to

THE DAY OF THE FALL

275

see that I had it all wrong. H

e was no hero. H

e was a survivor. A

ndsom

ehow I had w

orked out my ow

n salvation, my survival, in a

long series of acts, conditions, and judgments leading up to the

single word I spoke to Shel w

hen he found me sitting on his raw

silk couch with his w

ife ¡;nd asked me if I didn't really w

ant tocom

e wit.h them

to L.A

. that afternoon. 1\1y answer w

as: ?\o. I hadcom

e to be a survivor, too, and not even the old man w

as the old

man any m

ore.

AL

L 0 F the acts, conditions, and judgm

ents of a lifetime had put

my father on a vector tow

ard a spot in space and time w

here an RR

-

millim

eter shell happened to be rising toward 27:000 feet above

mean sea level on January 23, 1945. P

eople have long accepted, at

an unconscious level, the essence of theories such as chaos andcom

plexity. -'1any stories have been written ahout w

hat would

happen if you could travel hack in time and change just one thing,

no matter how

triviaL. T

he doggerel verse that begins: "-ibr lack ofa nail a shoe w

as lost./ For lack of a shoe a horse was lost. II cap-

tures the idea. If Colonel H

unter had elected to fly left seat insteadof right that day, I w

ould not have been born, and you would not

be reading this book. If I had been assigned to another story in1973 instead of airline safety, I w

ouldn't have knoi.vn about theDC-10 and would have gotten on that plane with She

i and Judy,A

nd you would not be reading this book,

But survival in the nlO

ment, or over hours or days or m

onths,w

hether that survival comes about by chance or effort or an inex-

plicable combination, m

ust be followed once m

ore by the same

struggle that led to that point. As Solon pointed out to C

roesus, alife cannot be judged until it is com

plete. l\fy own survival in not

going with Shcl and Judy, V

ickie and Mary, and in all sorts of

other situationsi is something I'm

still working out. If m

y father'sfall planted the seeds of this book, then the crash of A

merican

Flight 191 fertilized them and m

ade them grow

, In a world gov-

276 5 U R

V I V

A L

erned by an ineluctable order, which pushes through N

ewtonian

physics, Einsteinian relativity, therm

odynamics, and quantum

the-ory w

ith all the certainty of gravity or any other encroaching nat-ural law

, nothing can truly be said to happen by chance, which is

just a word w

e invented to explain the troublesome boundary

between order and chaos. Fate, then, turns out to be the struggle,

the tension, between the natuT

allaw that dictates that everything

should proceed toward disorder (entropy) and the natural law

that

dictates that everything should be self-organizing (complexity the-

ory). If those are, indeed, the nvo overarching natural law

s, then

everything becomes clear and .w

e go forward into the past to find

the Chinese concept of yin and yang.

Certainly, m

y father's survival did not end with his falling from

the sky. I v\iatched it take shape, even as it shaped me and m

yw

orld. It began there, a man w

ith broken legs and broken arms

and broken feet and ribs, his nose stuck back on almost as an after-

thought by a boy who happened by as he w

as weeping. T

hen hew

as packaged and shipped home, (H

e told me that the m

ost fear-som

e t1ight he'd ever had was not w

hen his wing w

as shot off. Itw

as the flight horne when they encountered a thunderstorrn and

he sat watching the w

ings make w

ild excursions up and down,

empiying the ashtrays oil that old D

C-3,)

lIe picked himself up and strove endlessly to grasp ihe w

orld inw

hich he found himsp.lf. 1 saw

him rise from

the grave and carn a

Ph.D., find a job at a prestigious m

edical school, publish scientificpapers, send platoons of new

doctors out the door to heal, and inhis spare tinie, learn to becom

e an excellent potter, to paint anddra\v and sing and play piano, carve sculptures out of w

ood, buildm

odel planes, tinker together our first stereo set, and drive hisnoisy fam

ily all over the continent in a 1956 Volksw

agen bus look-ing for adventure. I saw

him constantly and hungrily grappling

with his w

orld, trying everything, sampling everything, tasting

the world, to understand, to feed his insatiable curiosity, even as he

TH

E D

AY

OF T

HE

FAii

217

sat in darkness and peered through an electron microscope at the

inner secrets of a cell.

We spent one w

hole sumrner carving boom

erangs out of vari-ous kinds of "w

od and studying the aerodynamics to explain w

hythey returned instead of doing w

hat New

ton said they'd do: keep

going.

He was the only man I knew who'd read Finnegans Wake from

cover to cover. He rem

inded me of the G

reat Santini, who told his

son, "Eat L

ife, or Life w

ill eat you." In his Zen fashion, m

y fatherw

ould say, when I did som

ething- inexplicably wild, "O

kay, but ifyou break your leg, don't C

Ollie running to m

e."

I saw that catastrophe had not broken him

. He w

as the studentw

ho learned how to duck and therefore no longer needed sw

ords-m

anship. Adversity annealed him

. It gave him endless energy H

etaught m

e the first rule of survival: to believe that anything ispossible,